yes.
Now I can choose to argue with you and try to "educate" you if it feels important to me or makes me feel better.
Or I think what a effing mor. you are and stop interracting with you.
Or I change subjects since, apart from that strange thought, you are genuinely nice.

It's not my opinion but someone made a film about it (I think it was the Mad Heidi people).

You need to brush up on your English grammar on when to use "accept" versus "agree".

"… personality traits such as openness to experience, distrust, low agreeability, and Machiavellianism are associated with conspiracy belief.

Lantian et al. (2017) continue:

In terms of cognitive processes, people with stronger conspiracy beliefs are more likely to overestimate the likelihood of co-occurring events, to attribute intentionality where it is unlikely to exist, and to have lower levels of analytic thinking.

Conspiracy theories make a person feel special

Lantian et al.'s (2017) research examined the role of a person's 'need for uniqueness' and a belief of conspiracy theories, and found a correlation.

We argue that people high in need for uniqueness should be more likely than others to endorse conspiracy beliefs because conspiracy theories represent the possession of unconventional and potentially scarce information. […] Moreover, conspiracy theories rely on narratives that refer to secret knowledge (Mason, 2002) or information, which, by definition, is not accessible to everyone, otherwise it would not be a secret and it would be a well-known fact.

People who believe in conspiracy theories can feel "special," in a positive sense, because they may feel that they are more informed than others about important social and political events. […]

Our findings can also be connected to recent research demonstrating that individual narcissism, or a grandiose idea of the self, is positively related to belief in conspiracy theories. Interestingly, Cichocka et al. (2016) found that paranoid thought mediates the relationship between individual narcissism and conspiracy beliefs."

A psychologist explains why people cling to conspiracy theories during uncertain times
https://www.businessinsider.com/psyc...20-4?r=US&IR=T

Yeah that was clear from your side.
Sorry I phrased that poorly or in fact I was too lazy to form a conditional.
If a person voiced that opinion I could choose between:....

I just did.
While I agree with you and the examples given above, I think you might have to accept that "accept" can be used differently, depending on the context:


https://www.managementtraininginstit...ou-dont-agree/

https://www.quora.com/Is-there-a-dif...reeing-with-it

Of course, the sources are not as renowned as yours, but I think it's enough to indicate at least a colloquial use.

From your links, it is the difference between
I accept your opinion
&
I accept that is your opinion

Yes and thats exactly the point I was trying to make.

To me, it was clear that MC went for the second meaning in this context here:


But yes, that lady loves ambiguity

That's putting it politely.

Yep, bad example.
Maybe a few people got what I meant anyway.

To keep the peace at least on this one, I guess I should plead guilty.

So? Even the snow flakes were born by then.

All true. Your smoking gun proof is here!
Link incase the image does not embed

er no.

The Catholic Church never said the Earth was flat and this was never a point of contention, not even when Galileo was alive.

The point of contention was about the trajectory of the moon and planets.

What about option (C)

C: I accept that this opinion exists among a significant number of people.

If you want to do something about for example, genital mutiliation of children, the first thing you need to overcome is opinions that maintain it doesn't exist, or it doesn't exist here, or it does exist but it's so rare as to make no difference. And anybody who claims otherwise is a delusional idiot, or even part of the conspiracy.

"your" is a plural pronoun, so no Option C: it is already covered.

If, for example, significant numbers of people believe there is going to be an imminent and massive hike in tax on of toilet paper, it might be fair to expect that sale of toilet rolls is going to increase as people buy in panic.

Thus an incorrect belief can lead to a real and observable result.

If you want to understand the behaviour of people, of markets and societies, you need to take into account the incorrect theories as well as the correct.

If significant numbers of people believed nazis were going to come from the moon and reconquer the Earth on a given day, and were to gather in a given location and start shooting at random objects in the sky, it might be a good idea to avoid catching a plane flying over that area on that day.

"Ah, but the science", or "why should I listen to conspiracy theories?", isn't a good argument when you're dead.

I'm not sure I have ever written anything that contradicts what you have just written.

On the contrary, it's what makes conspiracy theories so dangerous and why they don't deserve a mainstream platform.

Look what happened with MMR.

I don't have the figures but I wonder how many mothers gave birth to deformed babies due to parents refusing to give their children the MMR vaccine so they missed out on the rubella component of the vaccine.

Even though Wakefield was discredited and stuck off. People still believe the vaccine causes autism to this day.
Or, as someone told me worryingly only the other day, "Of course MMR doesn't cause autism, that's been shown - but it does trigger it"...

Conspiracy theories don't need a mainstream platform to spread.

But if the counter-arguments fail to engage with the actual arguments of the conspiracy theorists, they are going to fail to overcome them.

The mainstream platforms tend to either ignore conspiracy theories, for fear that talking about them is creating free publicity for them, or otherwise they tend to engage with some caricature or exaggeration or comic summary version of the conspiracy theory, and engage with that instead.

You can't convince people by countering arguments they don't actually believe.

In other words, if you really want to convince people you first of all need to understand what it is they actually believe and why and try to put yourself inside their mind to see where the problem is. I don't really see many people doing this.

This is true not just for conspiracy theories but for almost any type of disagreement. It's why politics is so messed up for example.

No, but it certainly helps. I don't find people like F--ing Kite linking to some dark web portal but to Youtube. I don't think you can get more mainstream than Youtube.

Of course you don't need social media at all. The Church in the U.S, for example, appears to be another catalyst for nonsense.


I don't think you can convince some (or most) people at all. The autism one I mentioned when the believer just moved the goal posts in one example.

The creationists have another one when biological anthropologists find the missing link between A and C and call it B, they just carry on and next ask, "But what is the link between A and B)?

Probably it would be noticed when people start running around with weapons capable of hitting a plane that is 6 miles high.

There are locations where planes aren't 6 miles high.

Outside Kloten for example.